


New Friends, Old Ghosts

by bittermahogany



Category: Camp Camp (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 06:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8045296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittermahogany/pseuds/bittermahogany
Summary: Very rushed.





	New Friends, Old Ghosts

“Who’s that?” **  
**

Max turns, ready to mock whoever Neil’s pointing at. He follows Neil’s finger to a boy - sandy hair, blue eyes and a really bad fashion sense - sitting on his own in the mess hall, poking at his food but not eating it, “Oh, that’s just Jasper.”

“Who?” Nikki pops up, sticks in her hair and mud splattered all over the front of her overalls. She’s grinning like she’s just wrestled with an alligator and won and knowing her, she probably did. Max doesn’t ask.

“Jasper. He was here last summer too, and I think the summer before that. He gets sick a lot or something so he sits out of a lot of the camp activities. Lucky bastard.” Max would glare vindictively at the kid but Jasper already looks kind of depressed. He should be. This is a miserable place to be three summers in a row.

“Why put him in summer camp if he gets sick a lot?”

“Does it look like I know Neil? Does it look like I’m buddy buddy with him? He probably has neglectful parents or something that can’t stand to have him around.”

“Like you?” Nikki says.

“What?” Max swings his head around. Nikki’s looking at him all innocent like, head tilted and round eyes and everything.

Before Max can say anything though David claps his hand. The mess hall is still as loud as ever, louder with Nerris and Harrison arguing the next table over and Ered playing some trashy music on some speakers she found.

“Guys!” David shouts out in that pathetic way of his. “Guys it’s time for activities! Guuuu- ACH!”

David falls to his knees, his hands coming up to reach around his choking throat. He coughs and coughs. “Ah, something flew in my mouth.” His eyes water but eventually he swallows whatever object flew into his mouth and shakily stands again.

Max puts the straw in his hoodie pocket and smiles. He might not be getting out of this hellhole anytime soon but there’s always little things that can cheer up his mood.

“Alright guys listen up.” Gwen says, clipboard in hand. The mess hall falls silent, Ered respectfully turning down her music. “Today’s camp is…” Gwen peers at her clipboard, her eyes focusing on _something_ , “Jasper’s. Wait, who the fuck is Jasper?”

Everyone’s head turns, questioning and shrugging. Jasper raises a hand. “I-I am ma’am.”

“Oh.” Gwen scratches her head. “Well, you’re part of arts and crafts camp right? Well, arts and crafts it is.”

David pops up as the Quartermaster starts passing around construction paper, scissors, glue, and color pencils so short and stubby that the only way anyone was coloring with them was if they stabbed someone with it and coated the tip with someone’s blood.

“Jasper! Finally your turn huh bud?” David laughs as he skips his way to Jasper’s table, arts and crafts supply in his hand. Most of the tables in the mess hall were on the short side, made to seat little kids and pre-teens, so when David slid in next to Jasper, legs brushing the underside of the table and almost bumping it up, there was just something wrong with the picture.

David talking a mile a minute like a little kid also kind of added to the ‘not right’ picture. To be fair, the Jasper kid didn’t seem to mind, smiling and laughing with David, making silly faces…It was kinda sad.

“I kinda feel bad for him.” Neil says, rubbing his arm.

“Which one? Jasper for looking up to David of all people or David; a twenty four year old man too socially incompetent to have friends his own age and has to, instead, cling to a ten year old for companionship?”

Neil shrugs. “Both?”

Nikki hums, viciously clawing at the white construction paper in front of her, “I think it’s nice that David has a little friend.”

Max scoffs. “I think it’s pathetic that’s what it is, but I know how to fix it.”

“How?”

“By inviting Jasper into our friend group. That way he won’t have to be stuck with David for the rest of the miserable summer.”

“But what about David? How will we make David less friendless?”

“David? Fuck ‘im. That piece of shit can stay friendless.”

“So we’re getting a new pack member?” Nikki asks, staring at the two boys from the holes in her clawed up construction paper.

“Yes. Nikki, yes we are.”

———

“You’re dead?” Neil screeches as Jasper becomes less solid and more see-through. “I didn’t sign up for ghosts!”

“Actually,” David says, “it’s in the fine print and the camp’s theme song.”

“Where?” Gwen asks. David is about to answer - by singing the camp campbell theme song of course, when a sound interrupts him.

“Aha!” Max snaps his fingers. David smiles. Max didn’t smile much, so every time he did smile David took it as a hard-earned badge, even if that badge came about through pain on David’s end - it was still worth it for that - sometimes smug - smile. Just like now, David was proud to see that smile on Max’s face.

“And what are you ‘aha’ing about Max?” David asks, leaning closer to Max. It is always important to be on eye level with children, his parenting handbook said, that way children could know you were taking them seriously.

Max looks at David, triumph in his eyes and says, “Now I know why you’re so happy all the fucking time. You watched him,” and here Max points at Jasper, transparent and floating, “die a decade ago and you,” the pointer finger comes to David,  “couldn’t take it. That’s why you’re so happy. That’s why you think this place is so awesome because if you falter, if you think otherwise for once, then you’ll have to face the facts; that this camp is a horrible hell hole that took your best friend and that the man you look up to is a criminal if not a downright murderer.”

The camp is silent, even the annoying crickets have seemed to quiet in the face of Max’s revelation. Everyone’s head is turned - not toward the ghost boy, but to the ghost boy’s twenty-four year old friend and his newly acquainted friend; David and Max.

“Face it David,” Max says, “you witnessed something horrible the night ol’ Jasper here died and you haven’t gotten over it. No, you’re still repressing it because if you don’t you’ll break and you’ll shatter and crumble and fall. Just like Jasper did.”

Now, there was always something willfully child-like about David. Maybe it was the fact that he refused to swear or that he had more jump in his step than Max had in a hop, but there was no question. David was more kid than most of them - but there was something adult in him too, something more than just his size. He knew responsibility and he knew hard work and he knew things that kids didn’t know like taxes and where babies come from.

But in that instant there wasn’t any edge of adulthood in David. There wasn’t even a poor imitation of his usual peppiness in the way he held himself. Instead of the annoying adult Max had been stuck with for two summers, Max stared into David’s eyes and saw…a kid. A defenseless little kid too hurt by the world to pretend otherwise. There was no biting anger and no stubborn resolution behind those eyes, just a sense of loss and helplessness.

And that scared him. More than ghost boy ever could.

“Max.” Gwen says reproachfully, a look in her eyes that says, ‘you went too far’.

“David?” Nikki asks because David has been quiet for a long time and David is never this kind of quiet, this kind of held-breath, paused-motion, hauntingly kind of quiet.

“David.” Jasper says and like that David’s eyes have lost their hazy quality and he’s here. He’s here but he’s not because he’s shaky and he doesn’t say anything to Max or Gwen or any of the other kids, just goes marches into the forest and then he’s going, going, gone.

Jasper with his wispy eyes and wispy face and wispy everything just stares at Max and says, “You shouldn’t have said that.”

Neil steps up, eyes wide with just the tiniest bit of fear and nervousness in the edge of his bitten lip. “Where is David going?”

“My grave.” Jasper says, short and sweet.

“Isn’t anyone going to follow him?”

“…Sometimes,” Jasper says, and where David had lost his ‘adult’-ness before, Jasper seems to have gained it in return. A kid shouldn’t have such heavy bags under their eyes, “Sometimes, people want to talk to the ghosts of the past without actually talking to ghosts.” And here Jasper smiles but it’s strained, empty.

Just like David.


End file.
